


Good Monsters

by cirque



Category: Biohazard | Resident Evil (Gameverse)
Genre: Army brat, Backstory, Birthday, Childhood, Gen, Growing Up, Headcanon, Initiating kids into a criminal lifestyle oops, Jill/firearms OTP, Kids with guns, Parents & Children, Parents being morally ambiguous, Single Parents
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-05-15
Updated: 2013-05-14
Packaged: 2017-12-08 04:55:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/757286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cirque/pseuds/cirque
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maybe 'normal' means something else in the Valentine family. (Will eventually span from Jill's childhood up until she first joins S.T.A.R.S.)</p><p>(I added more to chapter 1 because it wasn't long enough to warrant a whole chapter of its own OTL)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Good Monsters

**Author's Note:**

> Ok, I've never really thought about Jill's relationship with her dad until I had a conversation with Ruin about it a few months ago, and now I am totally invested in this weird and yet completely lovable relationship between the two of them. A lot of people characterize Jill's dad as a jerk, or as some absentee waster that abandoned her a lot, but I kind of seem him as someone who made the best of what he had. And hey, Jill turned out ok, so he must've done something right ;)

_I have no fear of drowning; it's the breathing that's taking all of this work._  
 ** _Work – Jars of Clay_ **

****

Jill Valentine is up to her ankles in mud, and she's wearing her school shoes, and the whole situation is so ridiculous that she actually wants to stomp her feet. She doesn't though, mostly because she's practising the art of not being a brat lately, but also because it's damned cold and she just wants to get inside.

Behind her, coming up the yard, her father grabs her shoulders unsteadily. He is drunk – not blindingly so, but drunk enough that he's forgot his key and it is up to her to let them in.

"What's the hold up?"

She ignores him, concentrating on working her key into the rusty metal of their front door. The mechanism is old; she's told him before that it needs to be replaced, and there are no streetlights by their house to make the task any easier. Jill turns her back on him as she works. She's angry because it's eleven at night on a school night, because her school shoes are ruined, because he's drunk and she's left to be the parent. Again. Because he was four hours late picking her up from her friend's house and Marie Andrews had braided her hair with pink ribbons.

She tugs at the ribbons now with her free hand. They have mostly come unfurled in the wind.

"Let me do it," says her father, trying to push her out of the way. He is not normally rough, even when drunk, but her feet stick in the mud and she very nearly falls over. She grabs his hand to keep upright, but in the scuffle she drops the keys and they sink into the mud.

"Damn!" Says Jill.

"We really oughta pave this yard."

She rolls her eyes because he's _just that helpful._ She looks at him and does her best to convey "what the hell are we going to do now you idiot?" without actually breaking her vow to be a polite daughter, but he just grins at her.

Maybe it's the alcohol, but he's even less concerned by the situation than he would normally be. To highlight her unhappiness, Jill shivers pointedly, but he ignores her because he knows as well as she does that she'll play in three feet of snow without even wearing a coat.

He fiddles with her hair for a moment and she starts to think that maybe, just once, he's actually being affectionate, and she gears herself up for a hug, until she feels a tugging in her hair and realizes that the ribbons have come free. Her dad sends the pink material billowing to the ground and holds up the remaining hair pins with a weird smile of triumph.

"Dad, we can't break the locks."

He puts on a face of mock offense. "And why not? It's my house."

Not entirely true – her uncle's name is on the papers but she hasn't seen him in about a year and, month after month, it is her father who pays the rent. So maybe he's well within his rights to break in.

He crouches down in the mud, unsteady with the alcohol, and yanks on her hand.

"Get down here kid, you might as well learn. Next time you throw your key in the mud you won't come crying to daddy for help, will you?"

"I didn't throw the key anywhere," she says with a smile, crouching beside him, giving up entirely on salvaging her shoes. His words are cruel but he is smiling, and he pokes her ribs to coax a laugh from her.

His hands are too shaky to make a real effort of cracking the lock, so he hands the pins to Jill. She places them in the lock like he shows her, like he's explained to her a hundred times or more, and the lack of light only highlights her other senses as she feels for the catch of the lock's inner workings.

"Ah," she says, and smiles at her father as she feels the 'click'.

"You got it," he cheers, "Now push the other one in, and…"

He doesn't finish his sentence because she's way ahead of him; the other pin is above the second and she has pulled them both apart before he has time to tell her what to do. She's about to ask if it worked when she hears a slight clunking sound and then the pressure of the pair of them leaning sends the door open and they collapse in the hall with a groan.

"Go team," says Jill, straightening herself up and kicking off her shoes before she can dredge any of the mud onto their carpet.

"Atta girl," says her dad, and just strolls right on through to the kitchen, muddy boots and all.

 

* * *

 

It's her birthday and she wants to do something substantial because twelve is totally one step away from being a teenager and she feels like next year she'll be obligated to have a party with the kids at school and do _teenager stuff,_ but this year she is keen to spend the day with her father.

He laughs at that. "You don't have any friends?"

It is a Saturday and so she is off school, and isn't exactly enthusiastic about spending her birthday with any of the kids in her class. Her dad knows as well as she does that making friends is a luxury one cannot afford when you move around as often as they do. Still, they've been in this house for a year now. Jill prefers her own company most days of the week, but today she is oddly craving her father's attention.

"Let's go bowling," she says.

He rolls his eyes. He hasn't done fun stuff with her for a while now, not since mom died.

"Or to the movies?" She says this half-heartedly because she knows there is nothing on that they would both want to watch, and also that he would greatly object to shelling out money.

"I give up," she shrugs her shoulders. He looks at her, does that weird grin he does when he has an idea, and she thinks that maybe he's throwing her a surprise party, and Uncle Tom will come back, and there will be cake, and –

 

Three hours later she is ensconced in a crowd of her father's work friends, and someone is handing her a juicy hotdog overfilled with onions, and someone else is pulling her away from the crowd and shoving a warm gun into her other hand.

"Jesus!" She says, surprised. She's seen guns before, of course, has witnessed her father methodically cleaning his with more effort than he does his own beard, has been surrounded by the guys from work countless times as they rally around after a hard day, shoving guns into their holsters as she waits by the door for her dad. But she has never held one, not once.

"Go champ!" Her dad's voice calls from back within the crowd. She shrugs off the tomboy nickname; it would probably bother her more if she were a normal girl, but she's spending her twelfth birthday with a bunch of Air Force retirees holding a handgun so hey, maybe normal means something else in the Valentine family. She knows her father expected a boy, was sure of it even though he had no way to be certain and, when she was in her mom's tummy, had always called her his 'Jack-and-Jill' baby. If she had been a boy, she would have been Jack. But she'd been handed to him in a pink blanket and he hadn't faltered, just said 'Jill' over and over until her mom agreed. Never frilly and dull 'Jillian', but short and wearable 'Jill'.

The guys laugh and clap her on the back, jostling her further away from the house and closer to the edge of the back yard, where she can see they have set up a crooked row of empty tin cans. She goes along with it, because it's her birthday and it seems like fun, and because she is a Valentine. Her dad is nowhere in sight, but when she goes to take a bite out of her hotdog he is there to whisk it away from her.

"Nice try," he says, "One handed shooting is for pros only." He stuffs half the hotdog into his mouth and she rolls her eyes, adjusting both her hands on the gun now.

One of her father's friends, a tall middle aged man who appears to be fifty-per-cent facial hair, adjusts her finger positioning gently. His name is Carl and he hangs around the house a lot. She's not sure if Air Force guys have best friends, but if they did then Carl would be her father's.

"You've played with toy guns before, right?" Carl grunts. He is eating a burger and huge chunks of grease spill into his beard. Jill shudders, but it's nothing she hasn't seen before.

"Sure." Her dad had given her a Nerf Gun for Christmas.

Carl grunts again. "Well, forget that. This is the real deal now champ. We call this the Bobcat, it's as new as any one of us can afford."

The gun is heavy and shiny metal. It is pretty small and fits snugly into her two hands, her cheaply-painted pink fingernails clutching the trigger like it's about to turn around and bite her. It's a nice gun, she thinks. "No pressure," she laughs, and Carl slaps her shoulder amicably.

"That's the spirit." He polishes off the burger and doesn't bother to wipe his hands before he takes hold of her own, resetting her fingers on the gun and clicking the safety off with an expert thumb. "Do not squeeze that trigger until I say so." His voice is unusually serious and so she nods, feeling the excitement buzz right down to her toes.

He hooks an arm over her shoulders and moves her to the side, tipping her head to face the row of tin cans. The other guys gather behind them, murmuring in curiosity, and she can hear her dad telling them all to quiet down. It doesn't make a difference how much noise they make; all Jill can hear is her own blood pounding between her ears.

"Pick your target," says Carl, his arm still around her shoulder to steady her, "and don't take your eyes off of it."

There are five cans on the far wall. She aims for the middle one because it makes sense, and squints a little, pretending she is an old fashioned cowboy.

"Ready?" Carl asks, and she nods slightly. "Off you go then." He releases her and steps back, and that's probably the first sign that he expects something to go wrong but she thinks nothing of it because all she can think about is how cool this story is going to sound at school on Monday.

She decides that there is no point beating around the bush and so she plucks at the trigger with all her might, not really expecting to hit the target but still pretty thrilled about actually firing a gun. She hears an almighty bang, then hears nothing at all.

She wakes up ten minutes later, spread-eagled on the floor with her nose streaming with blood where she punched herself from the recoil, and her eye stinging where the hot bullet shell flew into her face.

It's still the best birthday ever.

 

* * *

 

By the end of the school year her father is already considering moving to the Air Force base in Colorado, and by September they have packed up their few belongings and resigned themselves to spending three days in a stinking hot car.

"This sucks big time," says Jill, sticking her hand out the passenger window after they have been driving for eight hours straight. It's still hot, impossibly so, and she is sick of everything.

"Life sucks junior," her dad lets out a puff of smoke and for a second the entire car stinks of tobacco, before the wind pushes it away.

They sing road trip songs for a while, but there are only so many renditions of B-I-N-G-O Jill can stomach before she turns on the radio hoping for something miraculous. It is rock and roll mostly, a few scratchy Elvis recordings, but this far out in the road the radio signals are pretty crappy and so she switches it off with a groan of annoyance.

"Let's play I-Spy," says her father around his cigarette.

"Let's not," says Jill, and rolls her eyes.

 

* * *

 

 

She is almost sixteen when Uncle Tom comes back. He turns up in Colorado with a gym bag full of possessions and wearing nothing but a stinky moleskin coat and a pair of blue jeans. He looks rough, to say the least.

"What the hell?" Says her dad, in greeting, as Uncle Tom pushes past him into the living room. Their Colorado Springs home is small, but nice, and neither of them are bothered by the small size because they spend a lot of time outdoors. Uncle Tom assesses the small room and shrugs.

"Hey there, little bro," Uncle Tom sounds amazingly cavalier for someone who has disappeared off the face of the earth for the past five years, so Jill hangs back at the top of the stairs, uncertain.

Jill's dad lights a cigarette and plops down on the sofa, dumbstruck.

"I realize this is… kinda out of the blue," Uncle Tom tries to be cool, sweeping a hand through his hair, but Jill sees his shaky gestures, his awkward limp, the point of his bones through his clothes that tell her he's had a real tough time these past few years. "I wanted to call you, I did, but by the time I was able to, you'd upped and left. I can't believe you just left my house…"

Jill's dad shrugs, and sucks on the cigarette thoughtfully. He coughs a little, hacking into a handkerchief from his pocket. "You left your own house, Tom. We had to move on. Damn, I thought I'd never see you again!"

"Yeah. Well. Y'know." Tom shuffles a little, and casts around the room desperately looking for some kind of distraction. "Where's the brat?" Jill bristles a little at that; when he had last seen her she was eleven, and gangly, and kind of a pre-teen nightmare. Now she is taller, wiser, bitchier, and still a nightmare, only now she has breasts and braces and she feels like an idiot hiding on the stairs from her uncle who might as well be a stranger.

"How did you find us?" Her dad sounds curious, not pissed off, and so Uncle Tom smiles lightly.

"Carl."

"Of course," says her dad, like that explains everything.

**Author's Note:**

> The gun that Jill 'plays with' is a Beretta 21A Bobcat. The gun does have a safety feature that tips it upward rather than backwards when firing a bullet, and sends the empty shell upwards and, in theory, over the shooter's shoulder. I bet it's a horrible first gun for a kid to fire, and no doubt the guys knew that. Happy birthday Jill ;)


End file.
